Putting pedal to the metal

An informal survey among the faithful would tell you just this: Since Robert Randolph’s been making his joyful noise, the distance between heaven and Earth has measurably narrowed.

So too, for that matter, has the distance between blues and rock, country and soul, black and white and young and old.

Charting a straight line from his Orange, N.J., church home -- the House of God Church -- to New York clubs, jam-band festivals and arena dates, Randolph has been spreading his cross-pollinated version of the gospel on the pedal steel guitar -- rave-up fashion -- for any and all who come.

Those numbers are increasing -- day by day, city by city. Certainly faster than he can keep count.

Right this minute in his room at the Mondrian hotel above the Sunset Strip, he’s more concerned with earthly, brass-tack matters, like paying the woman who just finished braiding his cornrows. Things have been so back-to-back crazy that Randolph opened his wallet to find he was fresh out of cash. “Do you have any money on you?” he sheepishly asks. “I haven’t even had time to get to the ATM!”

The pedal steel guitar maestro has been on hyperdrive, ever since his out-of-the-box performance in the all-funk tribute alongside OutKast, Parliament Funkadelic, and Earth, Wind & Fire at the Grammys in February, where he took his church’s “sacred steel” center stage to the secular world.

A dancing blur all over, under and behind his pedal steel, Randolph got more than a head turn -- all due to a whole lot more than his Julius Erving homage: a red, white and blue Sixers suit (yes, suit). The world didn’t know what hit it.

“It was like, ‘Ain’t you the dude who did the guitar thing?’ ” says Randolph, settling onto a patio chair near the hotel’s pool, steps away from the infamous Skybar. Buoyant and a bit playful -- at ease in his skin -- he’s pausing between an appearance at the Doheny Heritage Music Festival in Dana Point and a touchdown in Vegas for the Academy of Country Music Awards. This afternoon, he’s dressed casually in powder blue sweat pants with gold stripes and matching sneakers, all topped off with a Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles T-shirt. He has to be coaxed out of his ever-present bowler -- this one royal blue -- for a glimpse at the braid job. He concedes, but blushingly so.

He guesses that he and his group, the Family Band, have been on the road nearly 300 days a year in recent years. But since the Grammy showcase, he’s crossed over from hemp-and-tie-dye jam-band land to a much more multiracial, multi-genre main room -- without an inch of compromise. Comedian and DJ Steve Harvey had him on his 100.3-FM morning show. Prince phoned to give him his props. So did Lenny Kravitz. Anita Baker coaxed him to Detroit to record. A deal was inked for him to open for Eric Clapton on tours here and abroad. He made the talk show rounds: Letterman, Leno, Conan. And he’ll circle back to L.A. twice this summer to play the Hollywood Bowl, first for the Playboy Jazz Festival later this month and in August to open for Clapton.

“Last weekend I was in Jersey, and I played in church for the first time in a year. I just brought my stuff in. And they said, ‘Good to see you.’ ” As if he hadn’t missed a beat.

Dues paid in full

Randolph, with his openhearted grin, might seem to have sprung out of nowhere. But even at 25 he’s earned his veteran stripes on a number of scenes -- within his church world’s music ministry, on the jam-band circuit and on the downtown New York music scene. Whatever the setting, he cracks open a home-brewed, pulpit-and-pew-flavored mix he at one point termed “positive soul rock.” But even that description, he now admits, doesn’t sum up what he’s after. Randolph has figured out how to merge the raucousness of church praise-song with ragged, screaming guitar peals that are the benchmark of rock ‘n’ roll -- and play it coolly and soulfully all the while.

He makes it no secret that, growing up in Morristown, N.J., he spent a fair amount of time running the streets, trying to keep his head on straight. “That whole area was bad. People selling drugs, beating people up. I was involved in some of it.” But no matter what he was involved in, Randolph says, “I would always go back to church.”

By the time he was 16, the pull between the streets and his faith heightened: “I was out of high school, friends dyin’, I didn’t have no job at the time, I didn’t go to college. One of my friends got put in jail. I almost got put in jail ... “ And though his parents were deeply involved in church -- his mother as a minister, his father a deacon -- there were frequent near-derailments. What kept him tethered to his faith, Randolph says, was his growing relationship with the pedal steel.

The history of this little-known gospel tradition, “sacred steel” as it is known within these black Pentecostal quarters, dates to the 1930s. Usually associated with country music’s laments, the wailing, forlorn pedal steel turned out to be not only versatile but economical. For many poor congregations, an organ was beyond their means, and the pedal steel -- a guitar neck set onto a tray supported by four metal legs -- was subbed in to provide the musical accompaniment for Sunday services.

By his late teens, Randolph was under the instrument’s spell. “It’s soulful,” he says. “And it’s a weird thing. Because whenever I begin playing at a show, people fall into a thing” -- here his body goes limp, eyes cast heavenward -- “and they just start feeling guilty about something. Whatever you did wrong. I know.”

He began trying to mimic what he’d heard in church. It was a struggle in the beginning. But after his parents’ divorce, the young Randolph spent a month with his stepfather, pedal steel veteran Ted Beard. “He just showed me a bunch of old gospel hymns. When you’re young, you’re trying to do all of that fancy stuff. But what he pointed out to me was that it wasn’t about that. It was about how to make it speak. How to make it talk,” Randolph says.

“It’s the difference between singers today and singers in the ‘60s. When you hear a lot of the R&B; singers today, they stretch one word out, rolling it out. Then you hear someone like Al Green and he’s singing and it’s unbelievable. Even Elvis and Frank Sinatra too. People just singing a song. And it’s beautiful. And it was good for me to get that teaching: It wasn’t how much you do, it’s how you express. You’re not playing for yourself. You’re playing to get through to someone else too.”

At home, Randolph dug in so deep that the outside world started to recede. “I’d be in the house for hours at a time, practicing my instrument. Then I would go outside. ‘Wow! What world is this?’ I started to grow way too old for that. I just used to like to practice my guitar and go to church and play. Because I never looked at music as me being an artist,” he says. “It’s amazing ‘cause some of my friends are still out there.”

From church to the charts

His friends knew something was really up when instead of bumpin’ Tupac or R. Kelly on the stereo during rides around the neighborhood in his father’s Lincoln Town Car, screaming rock guitar licks announced him. A visiting cousin from Ohio had brought him a Stevie Ray Vaughan mix tape. “Before that I barely listened to anything other than what was playing at a house party or on Hot 97 or BET.” It turned his world inside out. “I listened to that tape for the next two years.” And it opened him to a range of music from the Rolling Stones to Elvis to the Allman Brothers to Hendrix. “I wanted to be the best steel player. The best.”

Before long, word got out. People wandered by the church for a listen. From there, the word-of-mouth machine was working full speed. And by 2000, a no-holds-barred performance at the first Sacred Steel Convention in Winter Park, Fla., not only brought the house down, but brought in a manager -- Jim Markel.

A demo, put together with cousin Marcus Randolph, followed and put him and the Family Band -- Marcus on drums, Danyel Morgan on bass and “third cousin” John Ginty on Hammond B-3 -- firmly on the blues, jazz and jam-band circuit as an opening act staple for groups such as the North Mississippi Allstars and Medeski, Martin & Wood.

“I can’t say that there was any ‘turning point,’ ” says Randolph, who left his full-time paralegal job in 2001, “because it seems like everything opened up a different door.” Sometimes just playing steel, other times picking up a guitar, Randolph always tucked in a surprise here and there -- whether it was “Voodoo Chile” or a television show theme.

One gig led to the next, another name to another bigger or different one -- from the Derek Trucks Band to Soulive to John Mayer and Dave Matthews. He slowed down enough to record on John Medeski’s “The Word” in 2001. In 2003, Randolph and the Family Band cut their first disc, “Live at the Wetlands.”

A style that’s one of a kind

By now people had a lot of ideas for Randolph.

“ ‘We’ll put you in an old room, with old, cool microphones.’ Or, ‘We could see you playing slide guitar while Method Man raps.’ I mean, I don’t knock people’s vision, but that’s not what I’m all about. It was important for us to establish our identity.” And Warner Bros. offered the sweetest deal: space and independence to come back with a collection of originals that felt rootsy, real and from the heart. The album “Unclassified,” released last August, shows Randolph at his open-borders best -- brimming with blues and funk, praise song and country twang.

“Unclassified” is studded with the openhearted optimism of Stevie Wonder, hot licks a la Allman, the loose tropical languor of Santana. And most certainly, Stevie Ray hovers over it all as guru and patron saint. The album has sold 131,000 copies to date.

In his hands, music feels, well, like music -- not black or white or sacred or “of the world,” but honest and well-traveled. “This is what we sound like at church. That energy comes out in the music,” Randolph says.

But he’s not in it to preach. He is in it to heal. To present an alternative. To give people something to think about, whether it’s the dead end they’re hurtling toward, or how to climb out of the hole they’re in.

“It makes me uncomfortable to hear, ‘You’re like God,’ ‘You’re like the Savior.’ ” No. No. “I’ve just got my own story to tell.” He knows all about dead ends and backsliding. Sure, Randolph has felt the friction and hears the criticism, like those before him -- Al Green, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin -- who’ve stepped out on faith moving from sacred to secular. “You can’t get away from it. It’s just going to happen. “

And almost every day the temptations present themselves -- women, drugs, cars. “People wanting me to invest in hedge funds!”

“Everybody wants to tag along. Be part of your world. Spend money on you. Go ahead, spend yours so I don’t have to spend mine,” he says with a laugh, then sobers some.

“I know that the church is the best place,” Randolph says. “Last Sunday, I looked around: Oh, this is what really go on in church. People come up and say, ‘Oh, I’m prayin’ for you.’ You forget how sincere everyone is, the service is. I’m not a star there. And I’m just there. Playing accompaniment.”

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A mix-master’s elements of style

Robert Randolph lets us in on who and what stirred things up and got his creative juices flowing.

Stevie Ray Vaughan

“His soulful guitar playing is something that I relate to. He made every note that he played count. It’s like squeezing an orange to make fresh OJ!”

Stevie Wonder

“He is probably the most versatile music artist of our lifetime.”

Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley

“These two brought pop and rock to the masses of people while being the masters of showmanship and hard work. They brought people together.”

Run-DMC

“For me when I was a kid, they were the first artists to let people know that hip-hop music was for real and it could be accepted by all people. This is similar to my musical background and part of my message.”

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Robert Randolph

Where: Playboy Jazz Festival,

Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles

When: June 20, 2 p.m.

Tickets: $15 to $100

Info: (310) 449-4070

Also

With: Eric Clapton

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles

When: Aug. 2, 7:30 p.m.

Tickets: $48 to $254

Info: (323) 850-2000